


Anabasis

by Shermanic



Category: Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Gen, Hiatus, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-19
Updated: 2011-06-19
Packaged: 2017-10-20 13:17:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/213185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shermanic/pseuds/Shermanic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was then, sitting at my desk with a sheaf of wasted foolscap strewn in front of me, that I realized I had written myself into the wrong story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Anabasis

Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake                                                               
and dress them in warm clothes again.  


—Richard Siken, “Scheherezade”

 

WATSON

I do not find it shameful to admit that, when I stood in front of my half-empty rooms at Baker Street for the first time after those terrible events that transpired that day at Reichenbach, I believed he would come back to me. I remember the scene perfectly, with a biographer’s exactitude. It was a little cold for the time of year, and raining slightly as I ran my fingers over the lines of my coat, feeling his note tucked safely into my pocket. I had tried to keep it pristine, but even then it had become creased and stained from the many times each hour when I would retrieve and reread it over and over again, as if reminding myself what had happened.

Fanciful, perhaps; but not shameful. I looked up at old our unlit windows that day in the rain, the city roiling around me, and I felt in my bones that he would come back to me with the same assurance that I held in my own identity, for those certainties were one and the same. Just as I played the writer, he was detective and hero, and heroes never die, not permanently.

He was the hero; I was the writer. I could not leave that storytelling behind. I imagined him as Aeneas, I imagined him as Odysseus, gone down to the dead to further his knowledge but always with the intention of returning. I smoothed out his note where it lay flat in my pocket. He would not leave me, I said to myself. He would come back. I was sure of it. I had only to wait.

 

HOLMES

I had expected to die that day at the top of the falls, and I did. The fact that my mortal body did not perish had nothing to do with it. In truth I had been preparing to die for a long while, for I was vain enough then to imagine myself a hero, with a correspondingly dramatic ending, and when I watched my friend walk away from me into the light of the afternoon sun, and looked into the eyes of the messenger-boy, I was not afraid.

Death was a weight removed. The burden of my identity and this whole messy business of living evaporated instantly, and the cold mountain air smelled fresher to a man who knew he no longer had to breathe. I looked below me, and saw my own life and that of my enemy’s crushed by water at the bottom of the falls; I looked above me and saw, though they lay hidden, the air-guns waiting in the trees. My purpose, such that it was, lay clear to me for the first time in years. I fled.

 

WATSON

I purchased a new practice, and tried to rediscover in medicine what I had once known in the war and become accustomed to finding through my adventures with Holmes, that wild rush of saving another from certain peril. Though our previous clients had always been in danger of dying from the outside in, mine now faced that same difficulty from the inside out; it was, at least, a change. Once or twice I attempted, by logical principles, to deduce the nature of my client’s situation and then explain it back to them, as Holmes had done, and so use their own narrative as a kind of balm.

It is true that I had showed little interest in such things when he was still with me, but now he had gone, and though that period of my life still remains somewhat gray to me, I imagine that I must have felt that someone must take up his skills in his absence. I did poorly at it, but it was something. Occasionally a stranger would offer me their consolations on the street.

Storytelling was my cocaine. By night I played out a mockery of Penelope, every time attempting a new account of my previous life only to read it over, find it bright and unconvincing and hollow as Holmes with a needle in his arm and his center scooped out, crumple it into a ball, smooth it out in a panic to see if I still might discover some truth in it, and tear it to shreds. One night I grew more disgusted than usual and, instead of essaying another bout of bad literature, wrote myself a long and angry screed explaining that it was useless, that I was foolish to have faith, that he had left me once and for all as I had always feared he might, that he was not coming back.

I do not know why I wrote it down, but it somehow seemed more real to me that way. And despite my bitterness and my useless regret, it was then, sitting at my desk with a sheaf of wasted foolscap strewn in front of me, that I realized I had written myself into the wrong story.

 

HOLMES

The world is a very simple place for a dead man. I slipped across perimeters and through cramped city streets with ease. The quotidian business of eating and breathing no longer plagued me; my body no longer required it; I had no body. I faded into shadows. Though I had left behind my love of petty puzzles along with my life, my deductions and my logical inferences, were at their finest in those years. I absorbed information without worry of the erosive consequences of such osmosis, for I had no borders left to maintain.

I was no longer troubled by such variables as emotion; my heart lay behind me, in England. My chemical research sharpened to a razor’s edge.

 

WATSON

I should have seen it from the beginning, for I made a poor Penelope. Crumple pages as I might, I had never been able to entirely cut the threads that the wove together one story with the next, much less my life on the page with my life in Baker Street or striding through the foggy labyrinth of a London evening. And arm in arm with this walked another understanding, which I had always held but now saw wearing a new face: the knowledge that the heroes and their faithful come as a pair, those who run with those who follow, and those who leave with those who wait for them to come back. But in my loyalty and my acceptance of this aspect of my role in Holmes’ life, I had left out another pair: those who die, and those who draw them back out of death again.

Here again I picked up my pen; I had once been his biographer, his Boswell, and could be so again. He had died and left me, but the dead need biographers more than anyone. Throughout my adventures alongside him I had seen enough ghosts return, whether to hurt or to help, to know this.

I did what I had always done for him. I wrote. Where my stories had previously given him an audience and myself a place in his life, now I granted him a voice. When I was writing about him it was the same as it had always been, but for that it was as if the two of us were in a room, somewhere else, and I was outside it. Perhaps I become unclear. The two of us, who we had been as a single entity, Holmes as the head and myself as the heart, were in that room. The person who I was when I was alone stood outside it, peering through the windows and the cracks in the doorframe to get a better view. The person who Holmes had been when he was alone had had the breath crushed out of him under Reichenbach, but I could keep him alive as he had been with me, if I wrote; and in my stories, the glimpses I saw through the window of my past life which had never left me, we lived.

I wrote madly, obsessively, often finishing an account of some silly adventure or other in a matter of days. I slept little, in the beginning. It was as if I believed that, if I stopped writing, he would die all over again, as if my words were truly what were keeping him alive. In a way this was entirely and literally true. It never occurred to me to refer to him in anything but the present tense. I wrote, and I wrote madly, and he lived; but even when writing I imagined him always with two coins in his pocket, as if to cover his eyes.

He would come back from the dead for me. I had no doubt of it. He needed only the sound of my words to guide him out the darkness, as in the old myth. All I need do was tell our stories, over and over again, and keep faith, and not look back.

 

HOLMES

One night in Zurich I woke in a panic to discover that I could not recall my name, and was forced to remind myself that I no longer had one.

 

WATSON

Despite the initial fire and desperation behind my stories, some shred of reason soon returned to me, and I realized that I would not last long if I continued living in this manner. All good writers must necessarily have one foot in the past, but both feet there can lead only to madness.

I began eating regularly again. I met with the literary agent who had helped me with my two earlier accounts, and found something different and yet overly familiar in him, as if I were looking into a warped mirror, with a coldness and a hunger in his eyes that was scarcely human. We drew up a contract and agreed to publish. I returned to my practice and eked out a living there despite the growing success of my stories, reasoning that, though I bargained on Holmes’ ability to survive on words alone, I could not gamble my own life on such a risk. I made an effort to apply that same stability and common sense with which I had been unable to provide myself in those reckless days after returning from Afghanistan, but which had suddenly blossomed in me as soon as Holmes set forth his own recklessness as a contrast. However pawky and fatalistic I might be in comparison to any other fellow, next to him I was always the sensible one. This was how he saved me after the war and it was how I might save both of us now. If I were to draw him out of the darkness, I must stand in the light, and remain solid and whole, as I had always been, beside his flights of fancy and his shadow.

 

HOLMES

Only when it rained, and when new issues of the Strand became available, did I think of London.

 

WATSON

My stories seemed to hold some bizarre and visceral appeal that, even now, I cannot explain; it was as if the desire for them had always lain within people, like groundwater, and only now was welling to the surface. I cannot deny that it was gratifying, but whereas before such praise might only have soothed my ego, now it convinced me that my mad scheme had some chance of succeeding. Occasionally I would hold a conversation with someone who spoke of Sherlock Holmes as if he were still alive and walking the streets of London, though they would undoubtedly have read the news of his death some years before. Surely these people cannot be blamed; we all of us want heroes.

Several times I held meetings with the literary agent, and watched as the knife-like hunger in his face ebbed alongside my writing’s waxing popularity. By the end of three years he might almost have been mistaken for a London businessman.

 

HOLMES

As the winter began, I realized that in several months’ time I would reach the three-year anniversary of my death. It was a peculiar thing to perceive that I had been counting.

 

WATSON

I had put off writing an account of our last journey together. The explanation for this may be very innocent and simply chronological; for the most part I had gone through our other adventures in their proper order, though I confess to a few fudged dates and mis-shelved cases in the thick of my creative panic. Or perhaps I did not want to write about how he had left me, or of how I had left him, walking away from him down the mountainside secure in my stupid and stable faith, not even looking back to see his face, gone to help a woman who was as imaginary and as pure a literary creation as he would soon become, scrambling upward and clawing my way up the path to the falls to return to him only when it was already too late.

Perhaps I had been holding out hope of keeping him alive with my words for so long that it seemed close to cruelty to kill him with them. Perhaps I was afraid of the end of my own journey, or that to publish such an account would come perilously close to turning and waiting for someone to appear behind me. But either way, I knew that I would have to write it at some point, if only to allow us both to come full circle.

So I gritted my teeth, and I wrote, into the night; into many nights. Only after a period of months did I finally set down my pen. I am done, I thought; it is finished. My heart was newly hollow, an empty house, and my part, such as it was, had been completed. What remained of the matter lay in his hands, white and cold at the bottom of the falls, and all I could do was wait.

 

HOLMES

On a December evening in Montpellier I was suddenly afflicted by a compulsion to return home. As I had, at that time, no home, this baffled me entirely; I could come up with no reason for such an impulse. This frightened me, and I do not believe that I would have acted on this fancy if I had not chosen at that moment to wander down the street and into a little shop with which I had already become well acquainted, due to its vending of various English periodicals.

It took some time to wrap up my affairs and ensure that I would not be set upon the minute I lay foot on English soil, but within three months I had booked passage across the water, and within one more I was traveling upwards, into the north. I stood on the deck of a steamship in the midst of a damp, suffocating fog, and watched the water below me as it lay entirely still. In all probability I was cold. I tucked my hand into my pocket and felt there the twenty carefully preserved pages torn from a copy of the Strand magazine, folding my fingers around them as if the words themselves could somehow enter my veins and grant me warmth.

 

WATSON

Again, I waited. It was maddening to be so powerless. I had no interest in attempting fiction; without anything better to occupy my mind apart from my medical practice, I turned to the case of Ronald Adair, whose murder had been so utterly inexplicable that it could hardly help captivating all of London, and not in the least myself. I suppose that, in the absence of a role to play as my own self, I felt that I must once again attempt an imitation of Holmes.

While walking to Adair’s house, in a flight of fancy, to examine the scene for myself, I chose to take a somewhat labyrinthine route and so pass by Baker Street. Our rooms appeared utterly deserted, the windows dark, and I did not know whether I should find myself feeling hollow or relieved. The slab of pavement on which I stood seemed, at a glance, unusually worn and scuffed; so, I thought, there had been other travelers who had come here to gawk and ponder at the great detective’s empty home. As I left it seemed to me that I saw someone moving, a familiar shape, just out of the corner of my eye.

 

HOLMES

I have always been skilled in the art of disguise, but, while dead and away from England, I had found my sobriquets easier to maintain without an identity to return to. Occasionally I had managed to make myself so average as to find strangers’ eyes sliding off me, as if I were not truly there. Yet now that I was in London again, though still a shade, I found my disguises to be less effective. This is not to say that I was so lax as to be discovered; but once or twice I found a passerby startled out of their reverie and watching me, for just a moment, with a frown of faint recognition on their face.

On the way to Baker Street, I passed a young boy begging with soot smudged across his face. Something in the sight moved me; here was another being at the edge of existence. I reached into my pocket and tossed him the two coins that remained there from my journey across the water.

 

WATSON

The tall, thin man who stood in front of Ronald Adair’s erstwhile home expounding his theories on the man’s death had carefully read, perhaps close to memorized, my accounts of Holmes’ deductions; I could tell from the dry, sardonic manner that he affected and occasionally let slip, and the dramatic flair with which he surely hoped to give credence to his absurd observations. He was a poor actor and a worse detective. The light raked over his colored spectacles and hid his eyes as he spoke. I turned, bile in my throat, and collided with the bookseller who had been standing behind me like a shadow.

As I left, after retrieving the old man’s volumes, and walked towards my practice, the conviction once again took hold of me that someone was following behind my footsteps, just out of sight. I held my breath and kept moving without looking back.

 

HOLMES

I followed him from that house of grief to his practice on Kensington Street, with a deftness and subtlety which can only be achieved by someone who is not really there. Nevertheless, I found the disguise more difficult to maintain than it had been in recent years; my knees ached, and my back complained incessantly at being so bowed.

Surely he must have known that someone was trailing him. I would like to think that my influence had not worn off so quickly. He walked with purpose and a slight limp, for it was a humid spring day and his old wound always troubles him in such weather. Though once or twice he paused and seemed hesitant, as if he were trying to see something out of the corner of his eye, he never once looked back. As we neared his practice he began to move more quickly, until he disappeared behind a set of worn steps and a neatly painted door.

The door was ornamented with a plaque, carved with his name and profession, and though I am aware that it was a ridiculous gesture I ran my fingers over the letters for a moment, just to become used to the sensation of feeling again. The metal was warm from the afternoon sun. I opened the door. I mounted the stairs inside, which numbered fewer than seventeen but would still, I knew, lead me home if only I had the courage to keep moving upwards. I neared the top, books in hand; tucked into Catullus were those twenty pages torn from a Strand magazine, and I ran my thumb over them like a promise. I was at the top of the staircase. I was in the hallway. Look only forwards, I said to myself, move towards the light. Do not look back. Do not be afraid. I opened the door. There he sat, lit from behind by the dying sun, older, with new lines on his face; my heart nearly stopped at the sight, so strange was it to have a heart again, but then I remembered that he had spent these three years living, as I had not, and that simply to live requires such strength that only the brave can be expected to persevere. I had not been brave, or a hero, but I was sure that I could become so again, if he were at my side. I spoke to him in a bookseller’s voice. He turned from me once again as he had on the street, as if he were somehow aware of the threads of myth running through my mind, and though he then repeated Orpheus’ final mistake and turned back to see my true face for one more time, the sound of the words he had given me and the sound of the words I had said through his voice granted me, Eurydice, strength enough to throw off the costume of my death, gather him up as he fell, pull us both together up from that awful abyss, tell him my story, draw us out of the darkness and into the lives that lay waiting.

**Author's Note:**

> Though inspiration came from elsewhere, this was heavily influenced by Michael Chabon's wonderful essay "Fan Fictions: On Sherlock Holmes," which I highly recommend to anyone interested in Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle, storytelling, fanfiction, or all of the above.


End file.
